Weibo Marketing: Five Steps to Getting Started

If you are looking to expand your company into the Chinese marketplace, then Weibo marketing is going to be a key tool to reach as many people as possible. Below are five steps to follow to get started on your Weibo marketing campaign.

Step 1: Account Creation

When you start your Weibo marketing, the obvious first step is going to be creating an official account for your business or brand. You will have to visit the Weibo account creation page and input some information such as a username, email, password, your location, and a verification code. Ideally, you will want to get your official account verified, like twitter verification, it will attach a blue V to your account profile picture to show that you are a verified company or brand. With a verified account you will have access to more features, like advanced page customization, more detail space, campaign management tools, mass messaging and more.

Step 2: Account Customization

Once your Weibo account has been created, the next step for your Weibo marketing strategy will be to customize the account to suitably reflect your brand's style and look. This can include adding various pictures to your main account pages, such as profile, background, cover, and banner. As well, you will want to add any relevant information about your brand to your account’s homepage. To help connect with your customers, including items such as your WeChat QR code can be a great boon to connect your Weibo followers to your WeChat account to better connect with them on more relevant platforms.

Step 3: Quality Content Strategy

Like all social media platforms, your Weibo marketing is going to thrive best if you have quality content going out to your followers regularly. This content can be broken down into key categories, which you would try to push content from all of them. “Brand information content” is going to be any content directly related to your product or service to let your followers know everything about what you offer. Soft content is content that is related to your product or service, often things you can do using your product or services. Interactive content is important as well, to get your followers interacting with your company; an example would be asking followers to post photos of them using your brand. Lastly, you can reach out to key opinion leaders (KOLs), also known as influencers, and partner with them, sharing content they create about your brand.

Step 4: Gathering a Following

Without followers your Weibo marketing strategy is likely to fail, you’ll need to start small to grow. Reach out to family, friends, and business connections to get them to follow your new brand Weibo account and get the ball rolling. As well, attach a link to your Weibo account on your social media bar on your brand’s website, or Weibo username to your company business cards. Connecting to your current database of customers is a great start, but to get more followers, you are likely going to need to start interactive campaigns, connecting with KOLs and pushing ads to spread your following. 

Step 5: Campaigns, KOLs, and ads

Once you have a following started, it’s time to get more followers through the use of interactive campaigns, KOLs, and ads to maximize your Weibo marketing reach. As mentioned before, you can do interactive campaigns through the user-generated content collection, or you can do something simple like lucky draws. Anything that gets your followers positively interacting with your brand. You should also reach out to any relative KOLs that have user bases that would find your product useful: you can offer discount codes, product trials, and giveaways that the KOL can offer to their user base. Weibo also offers numerous options through their advertising platforms, such as display ads and search engine promotion to further extend the reach of your Weibo account.

If you are looking to get a Weibo marketing campaign started, contact Westwin today, experts in China social media marketing.